A great deal of meeting technology has been developed that accentuates meetings between people and other collaboration opportunities. For example, calendar software allows organizers to invite people to meetings, track their attendance, and distribute content for a meeting, while video conferencing technology allows remote participation in meetings as-if participants were together in one location. A host of other technologies also contributes to ever-improving meeting experiences.
Even when advanced meeting technology is employed, the effectiveness of a given meeting can vary greatly from meeting to meeting. While some meetings are considered very effective, participants may leave other meetings with a sense that a meeting was very ineffective. In a counter-intuitive development, the wide-spread adoption of meeting technology has made it easier than ever to schedule and conduct meetings, which has increased the frequency and volume of ineffective meetings.
Discerning what makes a meeting an effective one versus an ineffective one is a difficult challenge, but some empirical conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of a given meeting by observing participant behavior during the meeting. For instance, gaze-tracking technology and speech recognition technology allows participant behavior during a meeting to be observed. Such observations can be studied to determine whether or not a particular meeting was an effective one. In the aggregate, knowledge about an optimal length of time or an optimal number of participants for a meeting may be learned and can be applied when organizing other meetings.